Books Featuring Ilona

Something for you to ponder…

Something for you to ponder…I’ve noticed that our real talents and passions can be traced back to early childhood. For example; I’ve always been “into” language (reading, writing, storytelling), music, and animals. No surprise, there’s more to me, but these three aspects have always been part of my life in a significant way. I didn’t all of a sudden turn into a math whiz or into someone who loves technology.

So I’m curious…

When you look back at your life, all the way to your early days…do you notice a thread? Or have you rediscovered interests and talents that – when looking back – you realize have always been there?

(Hint: if you’re completely stuck trying to figure out what’s next for you and can’t see the forest for the trees, going back to your childhood likes and talents can be a great eye-opener!)

Yup. There has always been a golden thread: Language, music, and history.
I have always loved reading, creating, and telling stories, myths, and legends. There has as long as I could remember an attraction to the spiritual. It has always been about the soul, the music, the art, and the stories of any people I have ever invented or studied.

My Childhood? drawings, art, music, writing.
My Adulthood? Mechanical Engineer and Designer.
Translated: drawings, art, writing. By the way I write songs and play rythm guitar. Unfortunately, one thing I have yet to learn is how to copywrite music.

For as far back as I can remember I haven’t liked it when people argued. I saw that if no one tried to help then the argument would get worse, or the people arguing would just stay angry at each other for a long time which also made me feel bad. I would try to see both (or all) sides of the argument to try to see a way that everyone’s feelings could be fixed and the argument could end.

(I’m noticing that as I think back to early childhood I’m writing in a child’s voice, but I won’t edit to correct it.)

By the time I was 6 I can remember friends coming to me to solve their arguments, even older kids.

Surprisingly this didn’t lead to an interest in law but with practice it did get easier to figure out what was important to other people, and once I knew what they wanted it was important to me to help them accomplish it.

Yes, it does stretch back as far as I can remember (and via anecdotes from parents, etc).

From the earliest days, I was an insatiable explorer of places and how things work, a night owl, and a dreamer. When the baby and infant stories are recounted, they include:

how the baby Cran who wouldn’t go to sleep instead figured out how to rock the cot on wheels out of the nursery and along the hallway to where the adults were gathered and playing cards;

how the infant Cran terrified the native houseboy by walking off the steep side of a New Britain volcano to see what was down there;

how the toddler Cran led a procession of slow moving traffic (including a bus) by riding his tricycle in the middle of the road;

how the preschooler Cran insisted on bringing his own books to kindergarten because he’d rather read a volume of his father’s Encyclopaedia Britannica or an issue of National Geographic;

how the schoolboy Cran bemused his teachers because he’d learned to type before he’d learned how to write beyond block printing.

I went on to work in just about every form of journalism – news, science, travel, industrial, etc – plus photography, performance work, transport and logistics, construction and renovation.

For fun, I wrote song lyrics, poems, short stories and an epic fantasy; completed five solo crossings of the Australian mainland – north-south and east-west; and studied geology at university. Then I got a computer, and discovered the internet and networking.